Cassini and Catalan identities

Cassini's identity (sometimes called Simson's identity) and Catalan's identity are mathematical identities for the Fibonacci numbers. Cassini's identity, a special case of Catalan's identity, states that for the nth Fibonacci number,

Catalan's identity generalizes this:

Vajda's identity generalizes this:

History

Cassini's formula was discovered in 1680 by Giovanni Domenico Cassini, then director of the Paris Observatory, and independently proven by Robert Simson (1753).[1] However Johannes Kepler presumably knew the identity already in 1608.[2] Eugène Charles Catalan found the identity named after him in 1879.[1] The British mathematician Steven Vajda (1901–95) published a book on Fibonacii numbers (Fibonacci and Lucas Numbers, and the Golden Section: Theory and Applications, 1989) which contains the identity carrying his name.[3][4] However the identity was already published in 1960 by Dustan Everman as problem 1396 in The American Mathematical Monthly.[1]

Proof by matrix theory

A quick proof of Cassini's identity may be given (Knuth 1997, p. 81) by recognising the left side of the equation as a determinant of a 2×2 matrix of Fibonacci numbers. The result is almost immediate when the matrix is seen to be the nth power of a matrix with determinant 1:

Notes

  1. Thomas Koshy: Fibonacci and Lucas Numbers with Applications. Wiley, 2001, ISBN 9781118031315, pp. 74-75, 83, 88
  2. Miodrag Petkovic: Famous Puzzles of Great Mathematicians. AMS, 2009, ISBN 9780821848142, S. 30-31
  3. Douglas B. West: Combinatorial Mathematics. Cambridge University Press, 2020, p. 61
  4. Steven Vadja: Fibonacci and Lucas Numbers, and the Golden Section: Theory and Applications. Dover, 2008, ISBN 978-0486462769, p. 28 (original publication 1989 at Ellis Horwood)
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References

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